Riptano
Discussion of Riptano, a company founded to commercialize Cassandra.
More on NoSQL and HVSP (or OLRP)
Since posting last Wednesday morning that I’m looking into NoSQL and HVSP, I’ve had a lot of conversations, including with (among others):
- Dwight Merriman of 10gen (MongoDB)
- Damien Katz of Couchio (CouchDB)
- Matt Pfeil of Riptano (Cassandra)
- Todd Lipcon of Cloudera (HBase committer)
- Tony Falco of Basho (Riak)
- John Busch of Schooner
- Ori Herrnstadt of Akiban
| Categories: Akiban, Basho and Riak, Cache, Cassandra, Cloudera, Clustrix, CouchDB, Facebook, HBase, Hadoop, MySQL, NoSQL, OLTP, Object, Open source, Parallelization, Riptano, Schooner, Theory and architecture, Tokutek, memcached | Leave a Comment |
Riptano, and Cassandra adoption
Tonight’s Cassandra technology post got plenty long enough on its own, so I’m separating out business and adoption issues here. For starters, known Cassandra users include:
- Facebook, which has said it has 150 or so Cassandra nodes (but see below)
- Twitter, which has said it has 45 or so Cassandra nodes
- Rackspace, which used to be Jonathan Ellis’ employer, and now is backing Cassandra company Riptano
- Digg, which along with Twitter and Rackspace was one of the three major users helping advance the Cassandra project
- OpenX, Simple Geo, Digital Reasoning, who Jonathan cited as production users in March
- Cloudkick, as noted and linked in my other post
- Two customers Riptano named at launch (but I’ve forgotten who they were*)
Fetlife, Meebo, and others seem to at least have a healthy interest in Cassandra, based on their level of involvement in a forthcoming Cassandra Summit. That said, the @Fetlife tweetstream features numerous yelps of pain, and I don’t mean the recreational kind. Read more
| Categories: Cassandra, Facebook, Market share, NoSQL, Open source, Parallelization, Pricing, Riptano, Specific users | 3 Comments |
Cassandra technical overview
Back in March, I talked with Jonathan Ellis of Rackspace, who runs the Apache Cassandra project. I started drafting a blog post then, but never put it up. Then Jonathan cofounded Riptano, a company to commercialize Cassandra, and so I talked with him again in May. Well, I’m finally finding time to clear my Cassandra/Riptano backlog. I’ll cover the more technical parts below, and the more business- or usage-oriented ones in a companion Cassandra/Riptano post.
Jonathan’s core claims for Cassandra include:
- Cassandra is shared-nothing.
- Cassandra has good approaches to replication and partitioning, right out of the box.
- In particular, Cassandra is good for use cases that distribute a database around the world and want to access it at “local” latencies. (Indeed, Jonathan asserts that non-local replication is a significant non-big-data Cassandra use case.)
- Cassandra’s scale-out is application-transparent, unlike sharded MySQL’s.
- Cassandra is fast at both appends and range queries, which would be hard to accomplish in a pure key-value store.
In general, Jonathan positions Cassandra as being best-suited to handle a small number of operations at high volume, throughput, and speed. The rest of what you do, as far as he’s concerned, may well belong in a more traditional SQL DBMS. Read more
| Categories: Amazon and its cloud, Cassandra, Facebook, Google, Log analysis, NoSQL, Open source, Parallelization, Riptano | 4 Comments |